There are a host of paint pellet guns available on the market. Some of these have semiautomatic fire such as the PRO/AM (trade name) by Tippmann Pneumatics, Inc. (located at 3518 Adams Center Road, Fort Wayne, Ind. 46806, phone number 219-749-6022). One problem with these guns is that when they are low on carbon dioxide the bolt does not have enough momentum when recoiling to latch. Therefore it fires again and again and continues to fire uncontrollably. (This is commonly referred to as cycling.)
One example of a fully automatic paint pellet gun is the Tippmann SMG-60 or the Tippmann SMG-68. The problem with these guns is that they fire too fast. Firing too fast is painful to the victim who gets hit with a multitude of paint pellets rather than just one or two. Firing too fast also wastes ammunition and cools down the gun, causing slower gas expansion, which causes a low pellet velocity. Lower velocity means shorter effective gun range and accuracy. Also a slower moving paint pellet will bounce off an opponent rather than breaking and marking the opponent. The cooled gun also may not give enough velocity to the recoiling bolt for the bolt to latch, causing repeated uncontrolled firing of the gun (cycling) even when the trigger is released.
Finally, the method of delivering a pellet to the firing chamber during full auto firing necessitates spring-fed clips to ensure quick, exact placement of the pellets. This spring-fed clip arrangement restricts the amount of pellets you could carry loaded in the gun to about 20 pellets, and causes the gun operator to have to pre-load hundreds of pellets into clips during the course of the day. Because of the aforementioned problems associated with full auto guns, they gradually fell out of favor and are no longer manufactured. The most popular type of fast shooting gun is now a semi auto. Because of the slower rate of fire with a semi auto, the pellet delivery system is much simpler than full auto. The pellets are simply poured into a hopper, which is set above the gun, and gravity supplies a new pellet to the firing chamber after every shot. The hopper typically holds from 60 to 200 pellets and is easily reloaded by pouring in more pellets as needed. Guns and attachments have now been designed to help this gravity feed by using gas expansion to push the new pellet into the chamber quicker than gravity alone. These feeding improvements still are not fast enough or exacting enough to reliably keep up with a typical full auto rate of fire. Attempting to shoot a semi at extremely fast rates will cause the gun to fire before the pellet has completely entered the firing chamber, causing the pellet to split and burst inside the gun. Additionally, the slight jerking of a semi auto gun while rapidly pulling the trigger causes a distinct loss of aiming accuracy.
FIG. 1 shows an example of one of the prior art guns to which a version of the present invention is attached. This gun has a bolt handle 1 and a trigger 35. The details of the manner in which this gun functions are assumed to be old and well known. Therefore they will not be discussed here. Note, however, that some of these guns use gases other than carbon dioxide such as air or nitrogen.